Welcome back to WIP IT UP WEDNESDAY. If you are new to this hop or are just now deciding that joining this hop would be a great idea, visit the WIP IT IP WEDNESDAY blog home page at: http://wipitupwednesday.blogspot.co.uk/ to read the sign-up instructions. Also on that page, you will find links to other wonderful authors and their WIP.

I managed to make it two weeks in a row. Yay me.

Today I’ll be continuing to sharing an excerpt from my upcoming novella, Saying Goodbye. I’m still working on my last read-through of the novel. I should finish it this week. Once I finish this read-through, I’ll start working on a synopsis and contacting my betas. I’m thinking the release date for this will be January 9th, 2016. Since this one is back from editing and the release date is so soon, I’ll probably stick with this novel until I get tired of it or until Outcast gets a little closer to its final draft. :)

The following snippet comes right after the last snippet I posted. Just a little warning. Things are going to get a little sad for a while.

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Erica wished she could say that she didn’t remember the visitation and the funeral. She wanted to be one of those people who blocked all of those thoughts, those images from their mind, but she wasn’t. She remembered it all.

To her shock, the visitation was open casket. In her mind, from the moment her dad told her his family would have a viewing, she saw him bloody, bruised, busted up, too grotesque for the world to see.

When she entered the funeral parlor and saw the open lid, she froze. She couldn’t see him that way. She didn’t want to remember him that way. She wanted the vision of her perfect angel-faced Michael with the scar above his left eye, day old stubble on his chin, and unruly brown hair to be the only image of him she would ever have in her head.

Her father took her by the arm and said, “It’s all right. They fixed him up nicely.”

That wasn’t at all comforting to her. No part of her wanted to see him, but she let her father lead her down the aisle. That day, that situation was not how she pictured the first time she walked down an aisle, arm and arm, with her father to look like. The man at the front of the room was supposed to be standing, looking dashing in his tuxedo, not lying down in a silk-lined casket wearing a gray suit. The flowers around him were supposed to be pink roses and baby’s breath, not white roses and gaudy wreaths.

Her mother followed behind them, rubbing Erica’s back. James, her older brother, his girlfriend, and her little sister, Emmy, were behind her mother. James awkwardly held his girlfriend’s hand, while trying to hold Emmy in an upright position. Her little sister, aside from herself, took the news the hardest. Emmy had worshipped Michael, and he had adored her.

The closer they got to his coffin and his family, the slower Erica walked. She couldn’t force herself to go faster. She couldn’t make herself see him laid out in the casket. Even glimpsing him that way would make everything a little more real than she needed it to be. A part of her hoped that all of it was some elaborate prank his frat brothers decided to play, but she knew they weren’t that cruel.

Her father pulled on her arm slightly to speed her up. He and her mother had assured her that she needed to view the body and pay her respects to the family. They said that it would be therapeutic for her to see him that way, to get that last bit of closure that seeing him would give her; visitations, funerals, in their mind helped people deal with death…helped them mourn.

Erica didn’t believe anything would help her get over losing Michael. He was her world, her life, her past, and her future. She was nothing without him. She understood, more than they realized that he was gone. Seeing his body couldn’t possibly cement the fact any more than it already was.

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That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed it.

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Winter Wonderland of Books Giveaway

Want to win an eCopy of Shifter, my BBW paranormal romance, and Saying Goodbye, my upcoming paranormal romance, a $10.00 Amazon Gift Card, or one of many other prizes.